THE HIDDEN MEANING OF NATURE - IS CLEAR IN THE MIRROR OF THE MINDTuristic residences and main house - Azoia, Portugal - 2013 -

On the promontory to the south of Cabo Espichel, just off Lisbon, facing the ocean and the Arrábida natural park there's a ruin near the end of the top platform and 3 smaller ruined houses, descending, accommodated to the path and the views of the marine sublime.

One could have seen Ulisses coming back from his journey. Or Icarus painted by Bruegel plunging in the waters. From here the path of Camões was truly visible, departing into a debaucherie trip of expelled bad blood coming back a beggar, a thief and a celebrated post mortem classical poet. Or Fernando Pessoa, as a child of 8, going to South Africa in a steam boat, returning a decade later to defy the warmth of Ulissinian sun with his projected second killing of Camões. Or the desertion of Portuguese Royal family to Brasil with all it's library on board and lices on wigs, returning with a lost empire, into the arms of the abandoned, the old and the cynical.

This ocean and these hills, earth and trees are a placid testimony of this human historical fictions. The fact that "things" happen is alien to nature. Happiness, suffering, hopes, plans, science, past and future, all abstractions to this army of the eternal and the incomplete.

In the early XX century Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorems destroyed the certainties of Mr. Wittgenstein double rational output. Rationality is beyond our true grasp. For Tarkovsky in Solaris the ocean was the planet's human consciousness and in Stalker the abandoned green zone was the granter of the inner wishes of the visitors.Nature with it's amorality and atemporal pathos as the captive of the true meaning of things.

As if the center of Plato's Cave is here. Azoia, south Lisbon, Ulissíada. The fact that the house belonged to Portuguese Millionaire Champalimaud and is now to rebuild part of them in mirrored glass is an ode and irony to that nature of stealth wisdom.